1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication performance measuring equipment for measuring network performance in communication using a TCP/IP protocol.
As personal computers and cellular phones connectable to the Internet become widespread recently, various providers have come to provide various services via the Internet to general users. Meanwhile, the general users' demands for not only receiving the various services, but also enjoying the services more comfortably are increasing.
In order to meet the demands of the users, it is necessary to create an environment which enables the users to receive the services comfortably. Further, in order to determine whether or not the expansion of facilities is needed for the purpose of creation of the environment, it is necessary to precisely understand the present environment through which the users receive the services, that is, communication performance which is represented by, for example, the time required for file transfer or the like using the TCP/IP protocol in the actual network as a medium of providing the services.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to measure the network performance of the communication using the TCP/IP protocol, either one of the following two methods is conventionally adopted.
FIG. 21(a) shows a first structural example of a conventional communication performance measuring system, and FIG. 21(b) shows a second structural example of the conventional communication performance measuring system.
In FIGS. 21, a client 401 is connected to an access point 403 through a router 402cl, and establishes connections to a server 404a and a server 404b through a router 402a1 to a router 402ak or through a router 402bl to a router 402bl, respectively, to receive the services from the server 404a or the server 404b. 
Therefore, as shown in FIG. 21(a), a performance measuring equipment 410 having a communication environment equivalent to that of the client 401 is connected to the access point 403, and the performance measuring equipment 410 measures the time required to establish the connection to the server 404a or 404b and the time required to download a file from the server 404a or 404b, so that the quality of service, which is provided for a user of the client 401, can be evaluated accurately.
Meanwhile, as shown in FIG. 21(b), it is also possible to adopt the structure in which another performance measuring equipment 420 is connected to the router 402ak to which the server 404a is directly connected, and the performance measuring equipment 420 records traffic flowing into the server 404a and traffic transmitting from the server 404a, respectively. When the structure is adopted, it is possible to evaluate the network performance on the server's side, by analyzing the information recorded by the performance measuring equipment 420.
It should be mentioned that, in the conventional art as shown in FIG. 21, the performance measuring equipment is placed at positions physically close to the client or the server to actually measure the communication performance of the network on the client's side and of the network on the server's side.
Meanwhile, the number of the users of the network, or the clients has been rapidly increasing, and their communication environments are widely various. The servers for providing services has been rapidly increasing as well. Enormous amounts of time, labor and costs are therefore necessary to actually measure the communication performance of each client or server by the conventional methods as described above. The reason is that, when the conventional methods are simply applied, it is necessary to place the performance measuring equipment physically close to each of the enormous number of the clients or servers for the purpose of performance evaluation.